Dell Mini 10 Touchpad woes in LMDE

[idiotmagoo]

Hi, I installed lmde on a Dell Inspiron mini10v and I'm wondering if anyone has gotten the touchpad to work perfectly on their machines. The touchpad on this machine has integrated buttons in the touchpad itself. When clicking and dragging the touchpad goes schizophrenic, making it nearly impossible to select text or scroll using the buttons.

Using the Arch wiki as a template, I set the synaptics settings to get it almost where it needs to be. It ignores the bottom quarter of the touchpad, but when one clicks a button it still registers it as a touch. Here's what I have in my xorg.conf.d settings file:

Code: Select all

Section "InputClass"
    Identifier "touchpad catchall"
    Driver "synaptics"
    MatchIsTouchpad "on"
        Option "TapButton1" "1"
        Option "TapButton2" "2"
        Option "TapButton3" "3"
        Option "JumpyCursorThreshold" "90"
        Option "AreaBottomEdge" "4100"
EndSection

It seems as though Ubuntu varients have a modified/hacked synaptics driver in their releases. I'm wondering if trying to install the hacked driver might be an alternate route.

Any guesses?

[idiotmagoo]

So, I think I've found further info regarding this annoyance. It seems as though that on boot the kernel doesn't recognize the touchpad as an elantech touchpad and instead registers it as a generic p/s 2 mouse. I checked dmesg and this indeed seems to be the issue. I updated to the liquorix kernel thinking that maybe a newer kernel would see it as an elantech touchpad, but no dice.

still researching . . .

[Dr.m0x]

Please allow me to offer you the fix for your problems.

As we are using the 2.6.32 kernel in LMDE you can simply follow these instructions.

The psmouse.ko patch works as perfectly with debian as with ubuntu. After applying it you will have full access to the touchpad options in the mouse settings.

I had to use the same patch to correctly detect the elantech touchpad in my Aspire D255 netbook.

[idiotmagoo]

yeah, that was going to be the next thing I try when I get the time.

The issue is that I installed the liquorix kernel so I'm not sure if I can apply this patch to it. I'm thinking of trying to apply it to the old .32 kernel, then test it on the .38 liquorix kernel; or just go ahead and do a fresh install (perhaps, switching to the LMDE XFCE while I'm at it). When I have the time to do any of these I'll post my results.

Thanks for the reply!

[Dr.m0x]

Interesting. The patch is only for older kernels. In theory elantech should be detected by 2.6.38. At least it was when I was playing with ubuntu natty beta 1 yesterday. Maybe liquorx is not compiled with the correct options.

Sent from my Android baby.